Websites such as these contribute to the £308million worth of card fraud in the UK each year.

During
the course of our investigation, Money Mail was offered a bundle of
details from any UK bank card we wished. The details may have been
enough to allow criminals to shop online and buy goods in stores and
countries which don’t use chip-and-pin technology.

Victims
of the scams are usually refunded by their bank - but this cost is
passed back to customers in the shape of higher fees and charges for
other services.

Richard
Hurley, a spokesman for UK anti-fraud organisation Cifas, says: ‘It’s an
open secret that banks hand on to their customers the millions of
pounds they lose this way.

According to the law, UK banks must compensate fraud victims. But they must also answer to their shareholders.

‘The banks will claw back as much cash as they can by increasing charges for things like bank accounts or overdrafts.’

On average, every set of stolen card details costs banks £120, according to the Metropolitan Police.

Criminals
can steal your personal details in several ways. Among the most common
are by infecting your computer with a virus - a program which will read
its files and register when you type in a password.

Your card’s Pin
number and details may also be copied by a device called a ‘skimmer’
which can be attached to cash machines.

Fraud: Money Mail was offered a bundle of details from any UK bank card we wished in the probe

Details
are then sold, often in bulk, on hundreds of so-called ‘carding’
websites, often based in Eastern Europe or China.

Anyone can register
for one of these sites - all you need is an email address - to get
access to a global network of criminals selling details from victims
over the world.

The sites change frequently, to evade the police. Money
Mail visited a number selling British card details from banks including
HSBC.

One seller on a
Russian website offered British credit cards, with full details of the
person’s identity, for just £19 each. For £190, they also claimed to be
able to offer access to a UK bank account with a credit limit of £8,000.

Another seller on a
separate Russian website boasted of having five staff working in the UK.
Within one minute of us contacting him, he offered to sell the details
on the magnetic strips of credit cards from any UK bank.

These
details can be attached to blank plastic cards and used in shops in
countries which don’t use chip and pin, such as the U.S.

Other
criminals use the ‘deep internet’. This is an anonymous network which
is even tougher for the police to trace and requires you to download
special programs.

Here,
Money Mail found one website, selling bundles of British and German Visa
cards and MasterCards complete with their security codes, with credit
limits of £2,000 each, for £25 per card.

The criminals trade under nicknames so they can’t be traced and write their posts in broken Russian and English slang.

At no point did Money Mail receive any personal details or bank cards.

All our findings have been reported to City of London Police and the National Fraud Information Bureau.

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